Posts Tagged ‘Optimization’.

Support for responsive images was added to WordPress core in version 4.4 to address the use case for viewport-based image selection, where the browser requests the image size that best fits the layout for its particular viewport.

Images that are inserted within the text of a post automatically get the responsive treatment, while images that are handled by the theme or plugins — like featured images and image galleries — can be coded by developers using the new responsive image functions and filters. With a few additions, WordPress websites can accommodate another responsive image use case known as art direction. Art direction gives us the ability to design with images whose crop or composition changes at certain breakpoints.

Varnish Cache is an open source HTTP accelerator that is used for speeding up the content delivery of the world’s top content-heavy dynamic websites. However, the performance or speed a newcomer to Varnish Cache can expect from its deployment can be quite nebulous.

This is true for users at both extremes of the spectrum: from those who play with its source code to create more complex features to those who set up Varnish Cache using the default settings.

You can’t underestimate the importance of consistent, high-quality web design across devices of all shapes and sizes. Responsive web design is the way forward — but it’s often linked to performance issues. This is critical when 64% of smartphone users unforgivingly expect websites to load in under four seconds, yet average page weights continue to rise.

The best designs balance aesthetics and performance by working with mobile in mind from the start. From setting strict performance budgets to implementing client- and server-side optimization techniques, I’ll share the current mobile performance optimization processes we use at Cyber-Duck.

Ask ten people what SEO is, and you’re likely to get ten different answers. Given the industry’s unsavoury past, this is hardly surprising. Keyword stuffing, gateway pages, and comment spam earned the first search engine optimisers a deservedly poor reputation within the web community.

Snake oil salesmen continue to peddle these harmful techniques to unsuspecting website owners today, perpetuating the myth that optimising your website for Google or Bing is an inherently nefarious practise. Needless to say, this is not true.

The web is moving toward using HTTPS encryption by default. This move has been encouraged by Google, which announced that HTTPS would be a ranking signal. However, moving your website to HTTPS is good for other reasons, too.

Rather than debate those reasons, this article assumes you have already decided to move to HTTPS. We’ll walk through how to move your website to HTTPS, taking advantage of Varnish Cache.

1.5 million apps in Apple’s App Store and another 1.5 million in Google’s Play store. That’s a lot of apps, and for a growing number of mobile users. An average user in the US will download only three new apps per month (at best), according to comScore’s “US Mobile App Report.”

Competition in the App Store is fierce, and if an indie app developer wants to get noticed, having an amazing product is no longer enough.

The web is slow, yet there are a few simple strategies to make websites faster. One of them is inlining critical CSS into the <head> of your pages, yet how exactly do you do it if your site contains hundreds of pages, or even worse, hundreds of different templates? You can't do it manually. Dean Hume explains an easy way to get it done. If you're a seasoned web developer, you might find the article obvious and self-explanatory, but it's a good piece to show to your clients and junior developers for sure. — Ed.

Delivering a fast, smooth web experience is an important part of building websites today. Most of the time, we develop websites without understanding what the browser is actually doing under the hood. How exactly does the browser render our web pages from the HTML, CSS and JavaScript that we create? How can we use this knowledge to speed up the rendering of our web pages?

Responsiveimages have been keeping us on our toes for quite some time, and now that they are getting traction in browsers, they come with a scary problem: the need to efficiently resize all our image assets. The way responsive images work is that an appropriately sized image is sent to each user — small versions for users on small screens, big versions for users on big screens.

It’s fantastic for web performance, but we have to face the grim reality that serving different sizes of images to different users means that we first need to create all of those different files, and that can be a huge pain.

Recently, I had a project in which I needed to produce high-fidelity screens for a tablet. I was to present these screens on the device and also produce a clickable prototype. They needed to be pixel-perfect. The timeline was tight (as always), so I went with my go-to tool, Photoshop. I’ve been using it for over 10 years, and it gives me the fastest high-quality output.

Are you designing at “Retina” resolution in Photoshop? If the answer is yes, then this article is for you. I will walk you through the problems I faced in creating Retina mockups to be displayed on a tablet device. I will then explain a way to work that is easier and gives you better performance. This is about my experience with Photoshop, but it could be applied to Illustrator and other software.

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